This comment is helpful, I see now where my communication wasn’t great. You’re right that there’s some contradiction between my earlier statements and that comment, I apologize for that confusion and any wasted thought/emotion it caused.
I’m wary that I can’t convey my entire position well in a few paragraphs, and that longer text isn’t helping that much either, but I’ll try to add some clarity before giving up on this text thread.
1. As far as group norms and moderation go, my position is as stated in the original doc I shared.
2. Beyond that doc, I have further thoughts about how individuals should reason and behave when it comes to truth-seeking, but those views aren’t ones I’m trying to enforce on others (merely persuade them of).These thoughts became relevant because I thought Zvi was making mistakes in how he was thinking about the overall picture. I admittedly wasn’t adequately clear between these views and the ones I’d actually promote/enforce as group norms.
3. I do think there is something violent about pushing truths onto other people without their consent and in ways they perceive as harmful. (“Violent” is maybe an overly evocative word, perhaps “hostile” is more directly descriptive of what I mean.) But:
Foremost, I say this descriptively and as words of caution.
I think there are many, many times when it is appropriate to be hostile; those causing harm sometimes need to be called out even when they’d really rather you didn’t.
I think certain acts are hostile, sometimes you should be hostile, but also you should be aware of what you’re doing and make a conscious choice. Hostility is hard to undo and therefore worth a good deal of caution.
I think there are many worthy targets of hostility in the broader world, but probably not that many on LessWrong itself.
I would be extremely reluctant to ban any hostile communications on LessWrong regardless of whether their targets are on LessWrong or in the external world.
Acts which are baseline hostile stop being hostile once people have consented to them. Martial arts are a thing, BDSM is a thing. Hitting people isn’t assault in those contexts due the consent. If you have consent from people (e.g. they agreed to abide by certain group norms), then sharing upsetting truths is the kind of things which stops being hostile.
For the reasons I shared above, I think that it’s hard to get people on LessWrong to fully agree and abide by these voluntary norms that contravene ordinary norms. I think we should still try (especially re: explicitly upsetting statements and criticisms), as I describe in my norms proposal doc.
Because we won’t achieve full opt-in on our norms (plus our content is visible to new people and the broader internet), I think it is advisable for an individual to think through the most effective ways to communicate and not merely appeal to norms which say they can’t get in trouble for something. That behavior isn’t forbidden doesn’t mean it’s optimal.
I’m realizing there are a lot of things you might imagine I mean by this. I mean very specific things I won’t elaborate on here—but these are things I believe will have the best effects for accurate maps and ones goals generally. To me, there is no tradeoff being made here.
4. I don’t think all impoliteness should be punished. I do think it should be legitimate to claim that someone is teasing/bullying/insulting/making you feel uncomfortable you via indirect channels and then either a) be allowed to walk away, or b) have a hopefully trustworthy moderator arbitrate your claim. I think that if you don’t allow for that, you’ll attract a lot of bad behavior. It seems that no one actually disagrees with that . . . so I think the question is just where we draw the line. I think the mistake made in this thread is not to be discussing concrete scenarios which get to the real disagreement.
5. Miscommunication is really easy. This applies both to the substantive content, but also to inferences people make about other people’s attitudes and intent. One of my primary arguments for “niceness” is that if you actually respect someone/like them/want to cooperate with them, then it’s a good idea to invest in making sure they don’t incorrectly update away from that. I’m not saying it’s zero effort, but I think it’s better than having people incorrectly infer that you think they’re terrible when you don’t think that. (This flows downhill into what they assume your motives are too and ends up shaping entire interactions and relationships.)
6. As per the above point, I’m not encouraging anyone to say things they don’t believe or feel (I am not advocating lip service) just to “get along”. That said, I do think that it’s very easy to decide that other people are incorrigibly acting in bad faith, that you can’t cooperate with them, and should just try to shut down them as effectively as possible. I think people likely have a bad prior here. I think I’ve had a bad prior on many cases.
Hmm. As always, that’s about 3x as many words as I hoped it would be. Ray has said the length of a comment indicates “I hate you this much.” There’s no hate in this comment. I still think it’s worth talking, trying to cooperate, figuring out how to actually communicate (what mediums, what formats, etc.)
This comment is helpful, I see now where my communication wasn’t great. You’re right that there’s some contradiction between my earlier statements and that comment, I apologize for that confusion and any wasted thought/emotion it caused.
I’m wary that I can’t convey my entire position well in a few paragraphs, and that longer text isn’t helping that much either, but I’ll try to add some clarity before giving up on this text thread.
1. As far as group norms and moderation go, my position is as stated in the original doc I shared.
2. Beyond that doc, I have further thoughts about how individuals should reason and behave when it comes to truth-seeking, but those views aren’t ones I’m trying to enforce on others (merely persuade them of).These thoughts became relevant because I thought Zvi was making mistakes in how he was thinking about the overall picture. I admittedly wasn’t adequately clear between these views and the ones I’d actually promote/enforce as group norms.
3. I do think there is something violent about pushing truths onto other people without their consent and in ways they perceive as harmful. (“Violent” is maybe an overly evocative word, perhaps “hostile” is more directly descriptive of what I mean.) But:
Foremost, I say this descriptively and as words of caution.
I think there are many, many times when it is appropriate to be hostile; those causing harm sometimes need to be called out even when they’d really rather you didn’t.
I think certain acts are hostile, sometimes you should be hostile, but also you should be aware of what you’re doing and make a conscious choice. Hostility is hard to undo and therefore worth a good deal of caution.
I think there are many worthy targets of hostility in the broader world, but probably not that many on LessWrong itself.
I would be extremely reluctant to ban any hostile communications on LessWrong regardless of whether their targets are on LessWrong or in the external world.
Acts which are baseline hostile stop being hostile once people have consented to them. Martial arts are a thing, BDSM is a thing. Hitting people isn’t assault in those contexts due the consent. If you have consent from people (e.g. they agreed to abide by certain group norms), then sharing upsetting truths is the kind of things which stops being hostile.
For the reasons I shared above, I think that it’s hard to get people on LessWrong to fully agree and abide by these voluntary norms that contravene ordinary norms. I think we should still try (especially re: explicitly upsetting statements and criticisms), as I describe in my norms proposal doc.
Because we won’t achieve full opt-in on our norms (plus our content is visible to new people and the broader internet), I think it is advisable for an individual to think through the most effective ways to communicate and not merely appeal to norms which say they can’t get in trouble for something. That behavior isn’t forbidden doesn’t mean it’s optimal.
I’m realizing there are a lot of things you might imagine I mean by this. I mean very specific things I won’t elaborate on here—but these are things I believe will have the best effects for accurate maps and ones goals generally. To me, there is no tradeoff being made here.
4. I don’t think all impoliteness should be punished. I do think it should be legitimate to claim that someone is teasing/bullying/insulting/making you feel uncomfortable you via indirect channels and then either a) be allowed to walk away, or b) have a hopefully trustworthy moderator arbitrate your claim. I think that if you don’t allow for that, you’ll attract a lot of bad behavior. It seems that no one actually disagrees with that . . . so I think the question is just where we draw the line. I think the mistake made in this thread is not to be discussing concrete scenarios which get to the real disagreement.
5. Miscommunication is really easy. This applies both to the substantive content, but also to inferences people make about other people’s attitudes and intent. One of my primary arguments for “niceness” is that if you actually respect someone/like them/want to cooperate with them, then it’s a good idea to invest in making sure they don’t incorrectly update away from that. I’m not saying it’s zero effort, but I think it’s better than having people incorrectly infer that you think they’re terrible when you don’t think that. (This flows downhill into what they assume your motives are too and ends up shaping entire interactions and relationships.)
6. As per the above point, I’m not encouraging anyone to say things they don’t believe or feel (I am not advocating lip service) just to “get along”. That said, I do think that it’s very easy to decide that other people are incorrigibly acting in bad faith, that you can’t cooperate with them, and should just try to shut down them as effectively as possible. I think people likely have a bad prior here. I think I’ve had a bad prior on many cases.
Hmm. As always, that’s about 3x as many words as I hoped it would be. Ray has said the length of a comment indicates “I hate you this much.” There’s no hate in this comment. I still think it’s worth talking, trying to cooperate, figuring out how to actually communicate (what mediums, what formats, etc.)